Hi there. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Author of Candida Crusher. Formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. I appreciate you guys giving me support and looking at my videos and for people like you out there that I make these videos.

Today, we’re going to talk about quercetin. Weird name, quercetin. It sounds like some sort of clothing label or some kind of line of shoes or something. Quercetin. What the hell is it? We give lots of different types of chemicals found in plants strange names. There is a group of them called flavonoids found in plant and flavonoids form a very important role in plants. They help protect the plant against a lot of different types of damage like solar radiation, too much water, insect attacks, all kinds of things. Plants make lots of different types of chemicals. Cornell University in America has done many, many years of research into all types of plant compounds going back for quite a few years. I think they actually led the world at one stage in a lot of this research.

There are many different types of flavonoids. I’m not going to go right into the biochemistry of flavonoids, but there are lots of different types. Some of the more important ones if you don’t know about are quercetin, rutin, and hesperidin. We’re going to talk about quercetin today. Quercetin is a compound found in things like kale, broccoli, tomatoes, green tea. Red wine contains a lot of quercetin. I find that quercetin containing plants have got this taste on the tongue that’s like a stringent dry kind of a taste. Brightly colored vegetables and fruits will contain quercetin.

Why should you eat this stuff in your diet? Why is it important to have a very healthy diet containing high levels of flavonoids? Flavonoids perform very important roles for plants in terms of protective effects, but they also perform very powerful roles when we continually eat those plants ourselves. Those benefits get conferred to us.

Before we jump into quercetin, it’s important to say that it has a very poor absorption rate. Many companies have struggled for years to try to make a very effective dietary supplement as far as quercetin is concerned. But a lot of the research I’ve looked out shows that the absorption rate can be as low as 2 percent. If you’re taking 500 milligrams a few times per day, you may be only getting a smattering of that in your body. You’re way better off getting flavonoids from your diet.

Flavonoids get bound to different proteins in your blood. There is one called albumin that quercetin and rutin and these sort of compounds hook up to. Then they go the liver and the liver has to break this flavonoid off the protein and absorb it through different types of pathways. Some of these pathways are metalation, sulphation, glucoronidation. You need to have a pretty good liver function to absorb good levels of flavonoids and you need to have good amounts of proteins in your diet to create the proteins in your blood to hook these things up to.

As you can see, there is a lot more than meets the eye here than just “I’ll just pop a few of these tablets and get a lot of quercetin in my diet.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s not that easy. This is why I’m always trying to get my patients to eat healthy proteins, first class proteins. Eggs, fish, chicken, lamb, good foods like that. If you want to go vegetarian, of course you can eat different types of legumes, seeds, nuts, and grains. Eating protein is an important part of hesperidin because the uptake is dependent on proteins.

Hesperidin plays a major role in the body as being a very powerful anti-oxidant. Anti-oxidants, what that means in English, is it means it protects out body from damage created internally just through normal metabolic processes. There are hundreds of thousands of enzyme reaction that occur every minute in your body and a lot of damage is created. Not unlike a motor vehicle that’s driving that creates a lot of pollution and damage. In your body, a lot of damage is occurring as of normal bodily processes. Anti-oxidants like quercetin, vitamin E, vitamin C, all these different types of anti-oxidant minerals like selenium and zinc, they confer benefits by stopping those processes from causing accelerated aging and pushing us into high inflammation states, driving us toward cancer and heart disease and diabetes and all those things we don’t even want to talk about.

If you don’t want to get sick – I mean, we’re all going to die. Come on. We’re not going to live forever, but we’ve got to die slowly and very healthily don’t we? That’s how we want to die. We don’t want to die in a hospital bed in some terrible chronic inflamed painful state. Eating a very healthy diet is going to be a bid step in the right direction as far as reducing your risks of developing chronic diseases of the western world prematurely.

Many patients I know will live to 80 or 90 and not even go to see a doctor. Why? Well, part of it’s genetic, but a big part of it also is lifestyle and diet. Eating the right kind of food on a consistent basis containing high levels of flavonoids like quercetin is a very thing for you to do. I’ve got a list up here on my computer I’m going to read out to you. Apples, peppers, red wine, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage like Chinese vegetables, citrus fruits, grapefruits, lemons, especially raw cacao, whole grains, including buckwheat, capers, raw red onion, black and green tea, beans and legumes, dark cherries and all kinds of colorful berries, egg plants, bell peppers, all of these foods are packed with very healthy compounds including quercetin.

Quercetin we know from research is also an antihistamine, so it’s going to help you reduce the effects of allergies in the body. People who take quercetin regularly, you can even get it as nasal spray sometimes, I’ve seen it for sneezing attacks and things like. People who have quercetin regularly in their diet have got a much less chance of developing asthma. I think it’s also very powerful for Candida patients because it improves the gut function. It helps to repair the leaky gut membrane.

It stops the effects of circulating immune complexes, where your immune system is actually attacking the Candida residues and they create damage. The quercetin helps to mop that up and it downplays that inflammation. Quercetin is a very important part of your dietary consideration when it comes to SIBO, small intestinal bacterial issues or Candida or helicobacter or any kind of a gut issues. I’d really like you to consider eating these foods I just mentioned. All those brightly colored vegetables. The berries, the raw cacao, the green tea, a good quality green tea. These things are going to help you immensely improve when it comes to your recovery. Please bear that in mind.

If we look at other flavonoids, one called rutin. That’s quite a good one especially for the small capillaries of the body like the kidneys and the eye. Hesperidin is another type of compound altogether. That can be used even more to your advantage for certain types of immune dysfunction. Bu quercetin is the overall powerful beneficial flavonoid that you’re going to get from these foods. Any cancer, reducing your risk of heart disease, reducing your risk for diabetes, reducing inflammation. It has some ability, especially if you have turmeric in your diet, to reduce pain in the body as well. Important things for you to think about.

I think I mentioned most things. Do your own research. You can take dietary supplements. Usually 500 milligrams two or three times per day with food. But as I said, the uptake is quite poor. I prefer that you get your quercetin from colorful foods. Give that a go. Thanks for checking out my video. Don’t forget to click on the link below if you haven’t already got my free report and subscribe. Keep sending me comments. Thank you. I appreciate the comments. If you’ve got any more questions particularly videos you want me to make, I’ll be glad to help you out when I can. Thanks for tuning in.

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